Just wanted to prove that political diversity ain’t dead. Remember, don’t downvote for disagreements.
Christianity should be criminalized.
Only Christianity, or all Abrahamic religions, or all spirituality?
Can i still like Jesus? Can i still study Christ as a historical figure?
What about ancient religious art? Destroy it?
What’s the punishment if i get caught thinking about The Lord, or God forbid, praying!?
Just for context i am not religious or spiritual, but it seems like a thought crime.
That intellectual property, both copyright or patents, doesn’t serve its theoretical purpose and just acts as a legal shield for the monopolies of big corporations, at least in our capitalistic system, and it limits the spread of information
In theory, a musician should be protected against abuse of their music. In practice, all musicians need to be on Spotify through one of the few main publishers to make any decent money, and their music will be used for unintended purposes (intended for their contract at least) like AI training
In theory, patents should allow a small company with an idea to sell its progressive product to many big corporations. In practice, one big corporation will either buy the small company or copy the product and have the money to legally support its case against all evidence, lobbying to change laws too. Not to mention that big corporations are the ones that can do enough research to have relevant patents, it’s much harder for universities and SMEs, not to mention big corporations can lobby to reduce public funding to R&D programs in universities and for SMEs.
And, last but not least important, access to content, think of politically relevant movies or book, depends on your income. If you are from a poorer country, chances are you cannot enjoy as much information and content as one born in a richer country.
I believe it does function in as it does in theory, but the justification to the public is what you list as “in theory.” Regulations like IP laws are only allowed to pass because they support the profits of those who hold the IP.
I would love to see IP law burned to the ground. A more realistic goal in the meanwhile might be to get compulsory licensing in more areas than just radio.
It seems like the atmosphere is changing now but I’ve been saying this for years.
The language of privilege is backwards and counter productive.
Humans aren’t going to evolve towards intelligence. We’re a pretty short-sighted stupid species. We’re going to continue to devolve and kill ourselves off, one way or another.
Sometimes people are that rabid they need to be removed from existence
One person is confirmed to have survived rabies apparently.
Rabies victims and rabid as in dangerous are different things mein freund
I took it as a metaphor for the amazing ability humans have to change
As someone who was in a supportive relationship with a transgender person for 3 years and who personally struggles associating with my own gender (masculinity was never my thing lol), I never really got into the stating my gender pronouns.
I get why it’s done for the times it matters and can do so in a sensitive space, but I get the sense it’s usually done as public compliance (like a cis neolib as an email sig), which can lead to shallow support or worse, resentment. What we ultimately need is more genuine contact with people different from ourselves because that helps reduce “othering” a group.
Oh, but I do tend to default to “they” out of old internet habits. Always disliked the assumption all gamers are men.
I don’t do it either, but i’m an older queer so i see it as painting a target on my back.
Ima be honest. I just don’t fuck with pronouns. I’ll typically use they even if I know what their preferred ones are. That or whatever feels better for what I’m talking about.
I’m really appreciating how much restraint y’all guys are showing with the downvotes. Thanks everyone.
Wanting less/more immigration are both perfectly valid positions.
Immigration can provide opportunities to a country but can also cause issues and it’s undemocratic and dangerous to demonize either position on the issue.
Abortion is not a moral hazard at all. Most people who might exist don’t. The whole “everyone agrees abortion is awful…” shit is obnoxious. I legitimately do not care. I am far more concerned about the lives of actual children. Once we seriously tackle that issue, we can move upstream, and this should be viewed as both incentive and a purity test for those who pretend to care about the “unborn.”
I’ve thought this for a long time. Until every living person has virtually every one of their needs met at virtually all times, abortion isn’t even on the table as something to worry about. We have a responsibility for what we have already, not some potential human that has plenty of other ways they would never make it to adulthood.
I am unsure about when it stops being moral to terminate a foetus/baby. I think it’s somewhere between 6 and 14 months, but that’s just my gut feeling. Some people are astonished that I would even consider that it could be after birth, but it’s not like any sudden development occurs at the moment of birth.
It is always moral if the woman doesn’t want the baby. Sometimes you don’t even find out you’re pregnant until it’s 7 weeks or so
It’s not about the development of the fetus, it’s about the woman’s autonomy. So long as it’s still inside her, her right to choose takes priority over its right to live, full stop.
I agree with my mom. 25 years is good.
For context she said that when I wasn’t 25 yet.
There can be too much political correctness at times.
Related: I believe it’s ok, given certain contexts, to speak broadly and crassly to people who expect that. It’s ultimately ineffective and therefore bad to come off as an pretenscious arrogant know-it-all, correcting everyone’s grammar and word choices and any ignorance they have. I see some students in the labor movement and wonder if they’re capable of expressing their knowledge to typical joe worker, without injecting French, German or Russian, or losing their temper at some unintentionally offensive ignorance. We’re speaking broadly to regular people, don’t alienate them with your academic knowledge.
That doesn’t mean never correct crappy things people say, you can and should, but pick your battles. A climate scientist once told me, being correct isn’t enough.
That Trump is neither conservative (in any way) nor cares at all about any traditional Republican values
I agree and disagree.
I believe he doesn’t actually care for anything but himself. He is racist and classist and what else. But I don’t think it dictates his politics as much as you might would assume. He wants power and through his own racism, he released that “vague” racism works, but mostly the creation of the “others”.
But I think his activities are deeply based in traditional republican values. That is why project 2025 exists. Republican think Tanks created it. You could argue that those aren’t republican values but e.g. they pushed for a horrible school system for decades. Trump doesn’t actually care about it, but he follows the plan because it aligns with government deregulation which he likes.
Trump and MAGA are regressive. They are hell-bent on taking this country back to the first half of the 20th century, in all the worst possible ways.
Most of them don’t even know what they want. They’re told what to think and simply can’t process anything on their own. Argue with one and you’ll be hard pressed to find an original thought, just regurgitations of what they’ve been told by fox news.
Perhaps it would be useful to build up from basics, asking them what issues actually affect their own life, and hopefully avoid all the hyperreality* culture wars of the media.
* https://assets.ourworldindata.org/uploads/2019/05/Causes-of-death-in-USA-vs.-media-coverage.png
I think we need to figure out how to make leftism more appealing to centrists, and particularly to the cis/straight/white/male demographic.
Leftism is unpopular by definition, especially to the privileged classes. Leftism seeks to upend the status quo, and loss aversion is a problem.
Not that efforts can’t be made.
Where in the definition of leftism is it said that leftism is unpopular?
I think you should read J. Sakai’s Settlers. It explains this (in a US context) quite well and I think that it refutes the concept of just making leftism “more appealing” isn’t a valid concept.
I can read the book, but… I just don’t understand how leftism can be successful without followers.
The white nationalist movement preys on alienated young white men (more than other groups). Creating avenues for including these people in our movement means less people we have to fight.
I’m not saying everyone is able to fit into our movement, or they may require so much education that we just don’t have the resources to depropagandize them, but as a mass movement, more is generally better.
100% agree. I honestly think that in ~2015, the left’s failure to appeal to young white men caused them to turn to the alt right. I think we scared them off with things like “check your privilege” etc., and should have focused more on getting them amped about class warfare.
As a person in that demographic it’s wild to me that leftism isn’t appealing… we’re supposed to just blame everything on everyone but ourselves I suppose?
The person on my left whispers about equality, and the benefits of social safety nets. The person on my right yells lies that equality means I have to give up things, and that social safety nets will be abused by people who want to steal the fruits of my labor. The person behind me (financially) says nothing, they’re too busy just trying to live. The person ahead of me points to the person behind getting food stamps and screams “how dare they take your taxes” while they quietly steal the actual fruit of my labor.
Any time leftism gets loud enough to get enough attention to appeal to anyone, rightism is already loudly complaining about the noise. If one doesn’t think about it too much, all they’ve heard is negativity about the left and positivity about the right. Call it brainwashing, gaslighting, or indoctrination, but rarely do the facts of both sides come to play. You have to work to find the truth of leftism while also working to ignore the bullshit being screamed from the right.
That is a controversial opinion here.
(And I agree with it. I don’t know what the way is, but I hope it can be found)
When you’re coming from a position of extreme privilege and you’re either a bit stupid or lack empathy or general social awareness being treated equally with “lesser people” (like women, brown people or people from particular religious backgrounds) can seem an awful lot like you’re being discriminated against.
I think you’re missing the point a bit. Liberal/centrist values are already to treat everyone equally, but not equitably. So when leftism comes in with suggestions for change, it looks to centrists like inequality. If you listen to centrists objections to leftism, this is what they say repeatedly, so I’m inclined to believe that is how they legitimately feel. This is why I think we need slightly different messaging/branding/whatever, or to talk about these issues in a different way, so that centrists actually understand what we’re getting at. It’s also not hard to find instances of leftists who, when angry, lash out at the majority – which while relatable to me, doesn’t help make leftism look appealing.
(By “majority” I mean the average joe, not billionaires.)
I think the first thing to do is to shift sentiment toward solving the problem of how to make things appealing to centrists and the apolitical. Let’s get “I agree – but that has bad optics so let’s focus on something else first” into our lexicon. Once the left is able to be more strategic about this, then I think we’ll gain a lot more strides. I have some thoughts about what that might look like, but it’s outside the scope of this post.
Fundamentally, what Centrists want is stability, for people to get along, to find solutions that the majority on both sides would agree with. For the status-quoish state of stability.
A Centrist would be a Liberal (as its defined today, and not how it was defined in the 70’s/80’s) before they would be a Leftist. They perceive Capitalism as a stable foundation of the society.
To get a Centrist to believe in Leftist ideals you’d have to try and show that Leftism is also stable, AND describe how the transition/change to Leftism on its own would not be an unstabilizing thing. And also how Capitalism is a dead-end alley for the species ultimately, and how its ultimately hurtful to a society by encouraging fighting and competition between its members.
You’d also have to show Centrists that Rightists would understand that Leftism works. Centrists want both Leftists and Rightists to be ‘happy’ (loaded word I know, but you get the gist of what I’m trying to opine on).
No idea how to do all that, but IMO that’s what would need to be done. You’d have to get the Right on board with Leftism, and you’d have to show Centrists that moving to Leftism won’t be destabilizing to their current way of existing.
Best guess would be to appeal to common belief systems (safety, fairness, freedoms, respect) that all three pillars would have in common.
An overall generic example would be to prove to a Rightist that a hand-out to someone is not being unfair, but its just helping someone out until they get on their feet, and can’t be exploited, to try and “raise all boats” in society. And you’d have to tell some Leftists to stop trying to exploit the system, that they’re now back on their feet, and that they need to put in as much effort as everybody else does.
For Leftists/Rightists stop yelling across the divide at each other, and start talking to each other, trying to understand what is important to them, and see if both sides can meet in the middle on those things that are important to both. Centrists will be happy that the fighting has stopped, and then you’d have to be extra careful not to destroy that non-fighting in trying to move the center to the left.
Oh, and do all of this while we have freedom of speech and people purposely trying to shape the narratives towards what they just want and to F with everybody else. A.k.a., “Free Will is a Pain in the Ass”.
Thank you for coming to my 🧸-Talk.
Centrists want the status quo, yes, but mostly just for themselves. This is why fascism starts with minority groups. Centrists will accept fascists “coming for the” communists/trans/migrants/etc, since it mostly isn’t effecting their status quo.
Centrists want the status quo, yes, but mostly just for themselves.
That’s not true at all. I know Centrists who care about everybody, and want everybody to be safe/happy/successful. They see it as a “floating tide raises all boats” kind of thing.
I think an awful lot of them actually have more leftish values, but they are convinced (and there is a huge self reinforcing bubble of that mentality, between media, politicians, and voters) that only the weakest, most watered down version of that can possibly succeed, politically.
Are you active in any socialist parties?
I would like to be, but I just can’t figure out how to get involved in my area.
I was going to follow up with a sick zinger but instead I’ll just be normal, ha.
It is important to grow the left, to turn it from like 100-1000 people in a given city into 5-10%. I can agree with that motivation, as can the vast majority of socialists. Our aim is revolution, that doesn’t happen from just a few reading groups, it has to become more.
The entire country already caters to the demo you mentioned. Everything is ready-made for them. Many orgs are dominated by them, such as the DSA. You should not write off straight white cis guys but they are consistently the hardest to reach because they are dismissive of others’ experiences with oppression and have been more shielded from capitalism’s worst in their country, but tend to feel very entitled to an opinion about it.
Centrism is the only described characteristic that is a chosen identity and it is a political tendency, if you can call it that. It’s a person with no political development whatsoever, they just vaguely cobble together an incoherent mishmash of common liberal and reactionary ideas that they can’t really defend but they call themselves an outsider as if that means something regarding someone whose political life can be summed up as, “sometimes votes”.
So what would it mean to try to boost efforts to recruit straight white cis dude centrists? Because the first things that would come to mind for me are usually called tailism by socialists and has a long track record of failure in the US in particular, where the US had a gargantuan labor movement that was entirely scuttled by liberal cooption and playing straight white cis dudes off of marginalized groups. There were entire unions that were segregated or disallowed black membership, for example. Those were the easiest to coopt into the red scare and, once they were used to out and isolate socialists, were then easily undermined and shrunk when their anticommunist government came for labor a couple decades later, having no radical core remsining and no material leverage.
That the dense city movement, of building up, instead of out, is ultimately ceding a huge proportion of our lives (our dwelling sizes and layouts, their materiality and designs, how the public space between them looks and feels, their maintenance and upkeep, etc. etc.) to soulless corporations trying to extract every dollar possible from us.
When we build out, people tend to have more say in the design and build of their own home, often being able to fully build it however they want because at a fundamental level a single person or couple can afford the materials it takes to build a home, and after it’s built they can afford to pay a local contractor who lives nearby to make modifications to it.
What they don’t have, is the up front resources to build a 20 story condo building. So instead they can buy a portion of a building that someone else has already built, which leaves them with no say in what is actually built in the first place. Ongoing possible changes and customizations are very limited by the constraints of the building itself, and the maintenance and repairs have to be farmed out to a nother corporation with the specialty knowledge and service staff to keep building systems running 24/7.
Yes, this is more efficient from an operating standpoint, but it’s also more brittle, with less personal ownership, less room for individuality and beautification, and more inherent dependence on larger organizing bodies which always end up being private companies (which usually means people are being exploited).
In addition, when you expand outwards, all the space between the homes is controlled by the municipalities and your elected government, and you end up with pleasant streets and sidewalks, but when you build up with condos, you just have the tiniest dingiest never ending hallways with no soul.
And condos are the instance where you actually at least kind of own your home. In the case of many cities that densify, you end up tearing down or converting relatively dense single family homes into multi apartment units where you again put a landlord in charge, sucking as many resources out of the residents as possible. In the case of larger apartment buildings, you’ve effectively fully ceded a huge portion of the ‘last mile’ of municipal responsibilities to private corporations.
Yes, I understand all the grander environmental reasons about why we should densify, and places like Habitat 67 prove that density does not inherently have to be miserable and soulless, however, the act of densifying without changing our home ownership and development systems to be coop or publicly owned, is a huge pressure increasing the corporatization of housing.
In general, I disagree with you. I think the two things you fixated on (souless architecture and rentals) are bad approaches to density, but you will notice that for the most part, this is the form of “density” that places who are notoriously bad at density do. Its what happens when we deliberately regulate ourselves into not allowing other options.
There is a pretty crazy amount of “density” in well bit, low rise structures - though actually I dont personally hate on towers as a concept.
Also, i would like to highlight that a very small portion of people are living in newly built homes, and only a small portion are really able to make meaningful design impact. Most just buy the builder-grade suburban model home. The idea that suburban single family homes are some design panacae is just wrong.
In general, I disagree with you. I think the two things you fixated on (souless architecture and rentals) are bad approaches to density, but you will notice that for the most part, this is the form of “density” that places who are notoriously bad at density do. Its what happens when we deliberately regulate ourselves into not allowing other options.
Soullessness and rent-seeking is what happens when housing is controlled by for-profit entities, and once you start building housing as system that is bigger, more expensive, or more complex, then one person / small family / support network can manage, then you inherently need to cede control and responsibility to a larger outside entity, which ends up being a corporation.
Even cities like Boston that have a relatively large amount of mid rise housing still have massive housing costs that suck residents dry because it all ends up being landlord controlled.
Also, i would like to highlight that a very small portion of people are living in newly built homes, and only a small portion are really able to make meaningful design impact. Most just buy the builder-grade suburban model home. The idea that suburban single family homes are some design panacae is just wrong.
I’m no fan of suburbs, but at an inherent level (assuming no crazy HOA), you have far more control of any house that you own over any space in a building that you do. Your average 100 year old suburban home will have far more charm and look far more unique than your average 100 year old apartment unit or condo.
To your last point, I don’t value the external appearance of my home at all. I see the outside when I’m exiting and entering. I see the inside for all the time I spent at home. So being able to change the internal appearance is far more important, and condos, as long as you don’t compromise the other units, generally give the freedom to do what you want. We need more affordable condos. Renting is still a useful housing supply, but the condo market needs to be absolutely flooded.
But property is for some reason considered a retirement plan so causing a housing crash would be political suicide.
Condos and townhouses also spawned HOAs which are yet another layer of an even pettier form of nosey neighbor government you get to live under.
Get a home outside city limits if you can, then it’s just county, state, and federal… Though depending on the city, municipal government isn’t as bad as HOA typically.
grander environmental reasons
No. Humans are not separate from “nature”.
Know the terrible intentions of “environmentalists” who would put you in battery cages.
The DNC is the primary obstacle to progress and no progress is possible between now and when they go the way of the Whigs because of the rigged duopoly system.
The animals we create are morally entitled to the exact same unconditional love and protection as our own children. Leftists practice tolerance but they’re not really willing to go as far as actual compassion, empathy, and mercy. A lot of the things they tolerate, they should not.
I agree, animal rights are important. I am not sure that animals are worth as much as humans morally, but even so, the argument for shrimp welfare is extremely moving. Well worth reading. It’s easy to imagine shrimp are undeserving of compassion because they are small, have tiny brains, and have a silly name.
I took a look at your link. I find it reprehensible, and exactly what I mean when I say the left is incapable of having compassion and mercy. This charity is exactly the sort of thing people use to psychologically enable themselves to continue torturing animals rather than changing their behaviour.
Well, I didn’t say all animals, I said the ones we create. When you create an individual, the act places in that individuals debt. You don’t own them, you owe them. We have a duty not to harm all individuals on Earth so far as we can help it, but we have far greater responsibilities to those individuals that we bring into existence. There is no difference, morally, between forcing a child and forcing an animal to exist.
Can you elaborate a bit more? I don’t seem to understand what you mean.
You haven’t met my parents.
